Why No Tears for American Victims of War?

The Los Angeles Times (“Half a Century Later, Relocation Pain Persists,” Feb. 16, and “Night Visitors Brought Halt to Family’s Hopes,” Feb. 17) gave good coverage to the wartime experiences of individuals of Japanese descent on the West Coast--mainly Orange County.

The U.S. Army, authorized by Executive Order 9066, removed more than 120,000 people, both citizens and non-citizens, from their homes on the West Coast and put them into 10 camps, inside barbed wire enclosures, in seven western states.

At the same time at war fronts across the Pacific, the U.S. military was taking a pounding in the Philippines. The sick and the wounded on Corregidor Island in Manila Bay needed medical supplies. These came from Del Monte airfield, which is 600 miles to the south on the northern coast of Mindanao island. It was a curious irony that the GI who assembled and packed the medicine and medical supplies for shipment to Corregidor was a Nisei, just the type being rounded up and put into one of the 10 camps back in the States.

I was that Nisei (second generation of Japanese descent in the United States). I was a draftee-private, a member of the medical detachment attached to the 5th Air Base Group, which operated Del Monte airfield. Just before the Philippines fell (May 8, 1942), I was flown out to Australia. Carlos Romulo and I were the only nonwhites on that escape flight to Australia in a battered B-24 bomber. (Romulo later became an aide to MacArthur and, still later, president of the U.N. General Assembly.) Six officers from the 5th Air Base Group (a lieutenant colonel and five majors) escaped to Australia a week after I did. The remainder of the men from the various units on and around Del Monte airfield all became prisoners of war.

YOSHIKAZU YAMADA, Irvine